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SUMMARY:Dialectal Chinese Speech Recognition - Thomas Fang Zheng (Tsinghua
  University\, Beijing)
DTSTART:20070824T103000Z
DTEND:20070824T113000Z
UID:TALK7865@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Marcus Tomalin
DESCRIPTION:There are eight major dialectal regions in addition to Mandari
 n (Northern China) in China\, which can be further divided into more than 
 40 sub-categories. Although the Chinese dialects share a written language 
 and standard Chinese (Putonghua) is widely spoken in most regions\, speech
  is still strongly influenced by the native dialects. This great linguisti
 c diversity poses problems for automatic speech and language technology. A
 utomatic speech recognition relies to a great extent on the consistent pro
 nunciation and usage of words within a language. In Chinese\, word usage\,
  pronunciation\, and syntax and grammar vary depending on the speaker's di
 alect. As a result speech recognition systems constructed to process stand
 ard Chinese (Putonghua) perform poorly for the great majority of the popul
 ation.\n\nEfforts have been made as in JHU Summer Workshop 2004 to develop
  a general framework to model phonetic\, lexical\, and pronunciation varia
 bility in dialectal Chinese automatic speech recognition tasks. The goal w
 as/is to find suitable methods that employ dialect-related knowledge and t
 raining data (in relatively small quantities) to modify the baseline stand
 ard Chinese Recognizer to obtain a dialectal Chinese recognizer for the sp
 ecific dialect of interest.\n\nIn this talk\, work done in JHU Summer Work
 shop 2004 as well as that in the following years will be introduced\, cove
 ring several aspects such as Dialectal Chinese database collection (for Wu
 \, Min\, Yue\, Chuan and so on)\, Dialectal Lexicon Construction\, and aco
 ustic modeling.
LOCATION:LR5\, Engineering Department\, Baker Building
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